Today the highly educated, well informed, and dazzlingly beautiful authors of I SAW THAT will act as your guides through the gowns, glamour, and gold of the greatest award in the history of our planet.

The 85th Academy Awards ceremony begins at 8:30pm East Coast/5:30pm West Coast. The Live Blogging starts some time before that…

“What did you think of it?”
“Well it started out pretty shitty…and then it got mostly shitty.”

This is a James Bond movie about how aging white men no longer feel powerful and important. You see, James Bond is old. How old? I don’t know, maybe 45 or something. His beard is all gray and white during the part of the movie when he is sulking because his mommy sacrificed him for the sake of a hard drive that inexplicably has all of Britain’s secret agents’ real names and addresses on it. When he goes back to fight more evil, he’s out of shape! He can’t shoot a gun, and even though his bod is still totally rocking (full disclosure: Daniel Craig gives me a huge boner that my husband finds embarrassing. He says it’s a “cliché” boner. I say one can not control one’s boners. He says he prefers my boners to be inspired by men of the Jason Schwartzmann/Mark McKinney/Harpo Marx persuasion (he also said “when a girl gets a boner, what happens” and I said “nothing, really, you just imagine James Bond crying in your lap so you can comfort him” and he said “gross”)), he gets real tired doing pull-ups. M clears him for duty even though he fails literally all of the tests. On the one hand I was thinking, Jesus, how long has this guy been out of commission? It seems like only a couple months. Does somebody like this really forget how to shoot a gun in that time? On the other hand I was thinking, why am I watching this movie.

Anyhoo, so the whole point is that Javier Bardem (best Bond villain ever, I wish the movie was just him chewing up the scenery like the Mangler in that one Stephen King short story, “The Mangler”), who is perhaps ambiguously pan-sexual and actually seems to physically come on to our hero at one point, a scene I very much enjoyed, I mean, can you imagine. But anyway the whole point is that Javier Bardem used to be a James Bond figure. He was a “brilliant” agent who M betrayed in order to save a bunch of other agents. He was tortured but kept her secrets, then tried to kill himself with his little cyanide pill but it didn’t work, it just horribly disfigured his face. Now he’s crazy and wants to kill M, who he refers to as “mother.”

Yes indeed! So it’s Good Son and Bad Son fighting for their mother’s love! And it’s aging people not feeling relevant anymore. This point is driven home roughly one hundred million times. See the new Quartermaster, who is like 17 years old and is just typpity typing away and oh, James Bond doesn’t know what’s happening! He even says “I can do more damage on my laptop in my pajamas than you can do with your gun” or something and James Bond is like “you wish, pal.”

It’s driven home when Ralph Fiennes wants to retire M because she’s too old. To be fair, M does seem really old. The prime minister is pissed because all these agents keep getting outed and killed and then Javier Bardem blows up MI6 and parliament is like, WTF is going on you weirdos? Why can’t you keep your shit together? Which I think is a perfectly reasonable government response to terrorist attacks in London caused by a rogue MI6 agent hacking into MI6′s own computer network or whatever, but of course the movie presents it as, like, these hateful bureaucrats who don’t understand the valiant struggle of brave men killing all goons. So many goons!

So M and Bond are both too old. The new Q is constantly making jokes about how old James Bond is, which just seems unprofessional. Javier Bardem is a computer whiz and has a magic computer that can follow them wherever they are and truly, guts and brawn are no match for the information superhighway, or something. The Prime Minister keeps being like “MI6 is old fashioned! We need people who can use computers!” and M keeps quoting Yeats or whatever and I was like, what the fuck is going on. Bond hangs onto an elevator and it makes him sweat, which is deeply disturbing because Bond is meant to be indestructible. Then a lady comes in and has sex with him inexplicably. Later he meets another lady and he tells her he can tell she’s terrified, and he wants to help her. He promises to help her. She believes him, and tells him to meet her on her yacht so she can take him to Javier Bardem who is holding her prisoner. By “meet me on my yacht” James Bond takes her to mean “sneak into my room when I’m in the shower, take off all your clothes, and then hop in with me, even though I just revealed to you that I’m so terrified for my life because of my imprisoned rape nightmare with this psychopath that I am shaking and can barely speak coherently.” It’s all good though because of the aforementioned rocking bod which shall subdue any feminine compunctions. Then Javier Bardem immediately gets James Bond to shoot her, after which James Bond reveals no emotion and just kills all the guys anyway and we never hear about that woman again. Perhaps the lowliest Bond woman situation I have ever seen, even though at least he didn’t rape her before he killed her (technically).

Javier Bardem’s computer magic is too much for Britain’s top agents to deal with. He makes a subway train crash through a wall into an underground cavern during rush hour. Must a trillion people die so that Britain can get this stupid hard drive back? I might be getting kind of sick of Britain. The computer magic is overwhelming and even somehow allows Javier Bardem to waltz right into a meeting of Parliament and try to shoot M right there in front of everybody. Soulless bureaucrat Ralph Fiennes redeems himself by shooting a gun and James Bond winks at him. James Bond kidnaps M and she’s like “where are we going” and he’s like “somewhere where people of our kind are no longer baffled and confused by the world of youth and technology” and she’s like “where’s that” and he says “BACK IN TIME” and then they literally just drive to Scotland, which seems really rude to me.

Ok it’s his childhood home! Now we are truly in the belly of the beast, a.k.a. James Bond’s horrifying psyche, which I picture as a depthless shrieking void filled with the ghosts of the millions of people he has killed, and gigantic disembodied boobs reaching out to him in a way that is somehow both wanton and threatening. Is this shit about to get super real? He has his mommy, finally all to himself; he has his childhood home, filled with the dust of ages and surely the memories of his parents; the ghosts are all coming out to play. Except he never reveals any emotions regarding his childhood, his childhood home, his parents, etc. What seemed like a promising plotline perhaps involving James Bond crying and clutching a dusty teddy bear just ended up in a helicopter exploding, like usual.

They know Javier Bardem is going to find them but since there are no computers or internet (?) they have a fighting chance. They rig the house Home Alone style, with booby traps and stuff, and a mirror that will make Britain’s most brilliant secret agent think there’s a real guy standing there! They get some old hunting rifles or something. Anyway Bardem shows up in a military helicopter and crashes it into the house and everything blows up but he’s still alive. We are treated to long luxurious shots of the entire sprawling Scottish manse exploding and being engulfed in flames; the savaging of his childhood, the combustion of the heimlich from which, presumably, all his horrible repressed unheimlich mommy-based nightmares flow. All he does is look at it for a second and boldly say “I never liked this place anyway.” Yeah no shit, James Bond.

James Bond falls under the ice. James Bond gets out from under the ice. M and an old Scottish man are hiding in Ye Olde Crumblin’ Chapel. Javier Bardem finds them and then basically has a psychic break with reality and is like “MOMMY” and hugs M and then tries to make her shoot them both through the head with the same bullet while he cries. I found this scene disturbing, then realized that it was because throughout the film I had pretty much been 100% on Javier Bardem’s side. You know what, it IS fucked up how M betrayed you, Javier Bardem! It IS fucked up, this horrible job and how nobody cares about you or knows your real name! You know what else, I’m just gonna say it, but James Bonds’s love of M is totally pathetic and sad. Imagine what such a man could have done with his life, but instead he chose to become a psychopath who only cares about this mean old government worker who would sacrifice his life for a hard drive. Anyway he kisses her on the cheek, his mommy, and she dies. What’s next for ol’ scrappy middle aged James Bond?

The worst part of the movie was all the wink-wink “fun” throwbacks to earlier Bond stuff. The whole movie is so defensive about middle-age and how old people don’t understand the world but really they are better than everybody else. So of course Bond is like “we have to change cars” and somehow it’s a 1974 Aston Martin or whatever that fucking car is. And then the old-school guitar-riff theme song comes in. And at the end of course it’s like “Oh I never got your name, girl I have fucked and had adventures with and who did once shoot me in the chest” and she’s like “It’s Eve……..Eve……MONEYPENNY” and you are supposed to be like “Ah!” and then chuckle delightedly. This is supposed to be fun? Am I having fun? It was like the whole movie was defensively saying “IT’S NOT BORING!”

There is literally a scene where a goon gets eaten by a giant dinosaur lizard in a Shanghai casino and James Bond is like “DINNER IS SERVED.” I made up that last part.

I have never liked the Bond franchise but then I really liked Casino Royale. Now I guess I don’t like it anymore. I mean, James Bond is a sociopath, and a drunk, and he just shoots people and is good at running, right? Is that really all there is to it? He’s a babe and he runs and he knows how to wear a suit and he’s clever. Some dillweed in the New Yorker wrote that Bond has been outdone by its descendants and I really think that is true. I really require my action heroes to have more going on upstairs, and in the emotions department. That’s why I kind of liked Casino Royale but apparently that one was a fluke.

In conclusion: Javier Bardem is a genius; Daniel Craig still gives me a huge boner; every time I see a Bond movie I think “I’m never watching another Bond movie” but then I do and the whole cycle is so enervating. Before the final credits they showed this Bond logo and it said “50 YEARS” and “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN” and it just seemed hysterical.

I was much more excited by the preview for Tarantino’s new period oppressed minority revenge fantasy.

Anyway, there, I said it. Also Sean Connery is disgusting, don’t even go there.

Once again at Steve’s house, where so many of the good things in my life take place, I was treated to a visual feast that left my eyes ruined for all the tawdry colors and fashion choices of the humdrum modern world forevermore. Yes, I can only be talking about: COOL!……….AS ICE

This 1991 narrative Vanilla Ice vehicle tells the stirring tale of Johnny Van Owen (Ice), the enormously puffy fluorescent fabric-clad leader of what appears to be a bi-racial gang of crotch-rocket-riding, rapping, high-fashion orphans, who answer to no man and who call no land home. We first meet them at some sort of dance or concert? In a warehouse. And Naomi Campbell is a backup singer. Everyone does the Cabbage Patch, my second favorite 90s dance. Later they do my first-favorite. I’ll let you guess what that is.

In the first of many moments where we found ourselves surprised into complimenting this film, Steve and I both agreed that Vanilla Ice is actually a really good dancer. A little bit later, my brow furrowed in confused concentration, I haltingly asked “Is Vanilla Ice…..like……HANDSOME??” The nigh-on-two-decades of brittle irony separating my current self from the version that actually owned To The Extreme on cassette cracked a little bit and I felt like I was gazing at Vanilla Ice, the human man, in a bit of a realistic, albeit dim, way. Verdict: Vanilla Ice was (is?) indeed handsome. Mind blown!

As the ragtag gang of fashion motorcycle rappers makes their way across the American countryside, they come across what is clearly a Rich Girl, riding a horse, on the other side of a fence separating some sort of stately grounds from the plebeian highway. Obviously Vanilla Ice immediately jumps his motorcycle over the fence, à la Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, almost killing the girl and her horse in the process. He finds her fury to be adorable, and asks her what her problem is. She punches him and rides her horse away like FUCK YOU, TOWNIE. Also, she is a prep.

Then as the gang pulls into a town, the comical one (he is overweight, thus comical) is all “Daaamn” and “oh man” and stuff, because his motorcycle has broken down! His masculinity eroded to a pitiful nub of what once it was, he finds himself towed via some sort of rope into a residential street where there is inexplicably a motorcycle repair shop run by two hilarious old hillbillies who I still think might actually have been figments of the gang’s imagination, like some sort of post-Revolutionary French short story involving a sensitive young man fainting and believing he has had sex with an ancient Egyptian mummy.

This older couple sets to work repairing the motorcycle while the motley crew of rapping misfits just sort of hangs out and makes “wah-wah” faces at each other concerning how square the couple is. Unbeknownst to them, this will become a match made in heaven, and will culminate in the old couple not only fixing the motorcycle, but lying to the police in order to absolve Vanilla Ice of a terrible kidnapping.

Vanilla then goes directly to the home of that girl who he almost killed on the horse. She dates a 1980s movie cliché of a shitty rich boy, like we might just as easily encounter him being sexually humiliated in the triumphant climax of Animal House, or thwarting Molly Ringwald’s great love by giving Andrew McCarthy class anxiety.

The girl (“Kat”) is like “you suck, turkey!” but Ice plays it so fucking cool you guys. Here once again I realized I was complimenting the film. I believe my actual words were “they have really good chemistry.” In spite of a later scene where he sneaks into her bedroom and wakes her up by dropping a whole huge ice cube into her mouth and basically choking her, somehow the relationship feels sort of sincere. And I mean, there is the whole concept of the bad boy helping her to liberate herself from her dumb oppressive gender-normative relationship with the preppy rich boy who thinks he owns her, and getting to ride off on a motorcycle at the end of the movie with a boy who is actually nice to her, which, I’m not complaining, it was 1991 and you had to take what you could get when it came to teen relationships in films.

The rest of the plot is sort of convoluted but basically Kat’s dad, the dad from Growing Pains, it turns out is in the witness protection program, and due to his daughter being interviewed on the news apparently just for liking her parents and getting good grades, his old criminal cronies find him, and they kidnap the little son, and Vanilla Ice saves the day. The son also plays a videogame that can be aurally identified as Super Mario 3, which then reminded me of how the whole world was introduced to that amazing game via the climax of the Fred Savage vehicle THE WIZARD. Remember how cool the mean bully in that movie made the PowerGlove look? And remember how lame the PowerGlove actually was?

But betwixt all that, there is a really epic love scene montage set in an abandoned construction site and involving Ice and the girl making out in every position you could conceivably manage while atop a neon motorcycle. They also play tag, and at one point Ice takes off his shirt, which I felt was a mistake, because then he started reminding me of the boy I dated in high school, all skinny white skin and blonde hair bristling with gel and a single earring and Jimmy Buffet on the tape deck. Not that Vanilla Ice would be caught dead listening to Jimmy Buffet. He’s a human being, after all.

And there is a scene where the gang goes and crashes a lame preppy school dance, where a bloated sweaty “rock band” is limping half-heartedly through shitty music, and then suddenly there’s a turntable there and the gang unplugs the amps and the band is like “HUH?” and they plug in the record player and somebody starts yelling into a mic and suddenly the gang is totally breakdancing and rapping and scratching and whatever else you call the stuff DJs and rappers were doing in the early 90s. This was the best scene in the film, due largely to the copious cut-aways to the faces of various lame preppies upon which their jaws were hanging literally agape, like these people are actually feeling their minds explode with the fucking awesomeness of the spectacle they are being unexpectedly treated to. Then Ice sexy-dances with Kat, which prompts her boyfriend to grab her in a rough way, which prompts her to run away from him and suddenly she’s, like, all alone in some creepy part of town in the middle of the night and the old cronies of her father are about to grab her and obviously rape her but Ice suddenly screeches up on his bike and is like DITCH THESE ZEROES AND GET WITH A HERO BABY and he revs her to safety and some super hot frenching action.

The best part of the movie is obviously the fashion, though. It is LITERALLY NOT ABLE TO BE BELIEVED, the way people look in this movie. I kept having to stop and ask myself, was I alive when this movie was made? Was this really even a small part of the world I inhabited? There was obviously a time when the people in this movie would have been understood as looking pretty cool. Vanilla Ice’s outfits are legitimately insane. There are fanny packs involved, and gigantic leather coats with tic-tac-toe on them, and overalls worn with the top part undone and flapping around, and neon everything, and crazy angular hairstyles, and sunglasses that are like, I don’t even know how to describe them. Also Kat at several points is wearing Ultimate Mom Jeans, which it’s so weird to remember that that’s what jeans used to be like!

At the end she goes to college and Ice is like “I gotta be me baby” and she gets on the back of his motorcycle for one more night of hot frenching before she has to fly to Harvard or whatever, and then he literally rides his motorcycle up over the car of the shitty preppy boyfriend, and everyone standing around laughs and cheers and that’s the end of the movie.

The Master, which I felt was too good to blog about, for I have not enough words in my pen to adequately express my awe and delight. I am a huge PT Anderson nerd, so I knew I would like it, but I liked it even more than that. A beautiful, strange film. My old man claimed to find the Jonny Greenwood “distracting” but he is a grump. I say: Greenwood forever! This film is so small and quiet, and yet it is more powerful than all the great epics put together, yes, including DeMille. It’s like that one planet where everything is 1,000 times more dense than it is on earth, so a golfball sized lump of its soil would somehow weigh a ton. Thank you for reading that analogy comprised of something I dimly remember from elementary school science class. Do you think Anderson is a dick or a cool guy? He’s married to Maya Rudolph, so I basically imagine that he must be more or less perfect.

Then at Steve’s house, after a heavy Tex-Mex meal and a large margarita, we watched

The Comedy!

What a strange, hypnotic, disturbing little film. It intends to disgust and trouble, and it succeeds, yet rarely have I found disgust and trouble so riveting. In the grand pantheon of movies and novels (and real-life stories) about useless privileged pieces of always-male shit just kind of wandering around hurting people and pointing out how stupid everything is, I would rank this one pretty high. It felt like all the most disgusting, hateful elements of Tim & Eric but stripped of all the absurd fun-loving silliness. Just pure, focused abjection. I have always found those guys’ comedy to be unusually self-hating (people always say comedians hate themselves but I feel those dudes take it to a new level) and destructive. I really enjoy their comedy; I find it genuinely hilarious, but I also appreciate its dark constant undercurrent of nihilism and self-disgust. If, as Freud believed, all of human life is based on the struggle between the innate forces of Eros and Thanatos, and that if Civilization is to survive, Eros must eventually win, then the comedy of Tim & Eric represents the submission to the death-drive and the abandonment of all pretense toward love, and thus the rejection of any belief in human goodness or in the possibility of Civilization righting itself. I find it exhilarating and also fascinating. In “The Comedy,” we watch a surprisingly-good-at-acting Heidecker out-Caufield Caufield in terms of loathing everyone in the world. Where Caufield saw everyone as just kind of faking it, Heidecker’s character doesn’t even see anyone as human, least of all himself. I guess he’s a sociopath, but in a really aimless way. I appreciated that the film never even vaguely attempted to make him likable–this is not your classic Overgrown Manchild Finds Love rom-com or the like. In fact, there is a very long scene in which he half-watches a girl having a violent seizure, and almost falls asleep while doing so (see photo above). It’s the moment where, in a slightly dumber kind of film, the character might have found redemption or we might have seen something worth salvaging in him, if he, for example, tried to help her or at least manifested some sort of concern or even consternation, but “The Comedy” resolutely does not go this route. Nothing is ever resolved, nothing is ever explained–he’s just a really rich piece of shit, and he knows it, and that’s the whole movie. It’s excruciating to watch and I enjoyed it. The performances are, I would say, superb. Also features Eric, who as a rule disgusts me a lot more than Tim and who has one of the best scenes in this movie, and what’s his name from LCD Soundsystem.

Then we went and saw

Argo!

Boy, I sure liked this movie. It also marks the very first time in all my life that I have found Ben Affleck sexually appealing. He’s grossly bearded, shaggy, and in full-on “70s Dad” fashion mode, and yet there is something compelling about him, at last, to my loins.

This movie is apparently based on something that really happened, and that is so crazy I still can’t believe it. Apparently during the Iran hostage crisis, six Americans escaped the embassy and basically wandered around the streets of revolutionary Iran, which were filled with furiously angry people who would have probably torn them limb-from-limb if they’d been seen, and they knocked on the Canadian ambassador’s door and he let them live in his house for 2 months in secret. Meanwhile, everyone else caught in the American embassy was held hostage, in what could only have been extremely stressful conditions, for 444 days. When the CIA found out that these 6 had escaped and were living in the Canadian ambassador’s house, they developed a plan so kooky it just might work, wherein an extraction expert actually went to Hollywood posing as a big-time movie producer, got together a full film–script, cast, crew, financing, director–advertised it with big glossy promo ads in the trade magazines, had full storyboards made and mounted, had press events where the cast did full read-throughs of the entire script, opened an office on the studio lot, and generally made a lot of noise about how he was going to Iran with a 6-member team to scout film locations for a sci-fi movie. Oh and also he pretended to be Canadian. Apparently this actually happened, like in real history, which makes you like the CIA just a teeny bit more (not literally). Bryan Cranston plays the salty CIA dude who okays this bonkers mission and gets to say things like “No sir, this is the best bad idea we’ve got…by a long shot” to a super-pissed Phillip Baker Hall. Everyone in the government thinks this idea is so stupid but literally no one can come up with a better one, so they basically just say “okay give it a shot.” Like, JIMMY CARTER knew about and condoned this scheme. In real life! That is so hilarious.

I could not keep track of who was who in the white house, but there are A LOT of men running around screaming things like “I WANT YOU TO DO YOUR FUCKING JOB” at each other and smoking incessantly. Coach Taylor plays some sort of Chief of Staff who yells manfully into telephones and has a big mop of virile black hair. Everyone else is bald and has absolutely hideous mustaches: hideous.

Well, what a delightful set-up for a picture show! The opening sequence, which depicts the Iranians storming the American embassy, is FUCKING HARROWING. I realized I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat and gritting my teeth. Holy shit!

But this leads me to the main piece of praise I have for the movie, which is that it carefully, consciously REFUSED to demonize the Iranians. Perhaps you will disagree, but I felt very empathetic for the Iranians throughout the film–at no point was I thinking “these horrible villains! why are they being so mean?” Indeed the film opens with a quick run-through of then-recent American history, explaining how Iran elected (? I think) this badass dude who nationalized all their oil and who put the country on track to become wealthy and stable and awesome, but then the U.S., needing said oil, staged a coup and installed their own puppet Shah instead, who was universally loathed and under whom all the cool reforms were rolled back. He also relentlessly westernized the country even though generally people weren’t into it. As revolutionary rage was ramping up, the U.S. evacuated the Shah, who was dying of cancer, and then refused to send him back to his country to stand trial. So yeah, you think the Iranians don’t have a right to storm the U.S. Embassy? Under the circumstances I feel they showed remarkable restraint, to be honest.

And throughout the film, even as you are of course being cinematically manipulated into identifying intensely with the hostages and with Ben Affleck, who just wants to make it to his son’s birthday party, and even as you are biting your fingernails hoping they will escape, there is never any demonizing. At least, I didn’t feel there was. Even the revolutionary guard who almost catches them in the airport during the insane climax is portrayed so humanly, it’s like, yeah, you want our dudes to escape but you’re also very much identifying with the Iranian dude, who is PISSED OFF FOR GOOD REASONS. Also the actor playing him is incredible. I thought about him for hours afterward. Nobody is a kooky caricature; there are no villainous Arabs hindering American freedom or anything like that, really. I think the movie does such a good job of presenting this as a crazy time, filled with people having a lot of justified feelings and trying to steer their country in a good direction; trying to hold other countries accountable for their totally nefarious and evil meddling. Imagine how mad you’d be if Iran came over here, killed the President, and stuck, I don’t know, Donald Trump in office, to rule over us all. That’s a bad example because Trump is so virulently anti-Arab but anyway, let me tell you, I would not like it one bit.

I also enjoyed how the film took big, lazy chunks of time off from the harrowing events unfolding in Iran to show us the delightful antics of Hollywood. See Alan Arkin give a scathing dressing-down to a posturing studio exec! See John Goodman make a bunch of jokes about show biz! See the hilarious press event with the readthrough! What fun!!!!

In conclusion: a good time at movies

I still need to see Cloud Atlas and, surprisingly, that Silver Linings movie, which seems like it ought to be terrible but which reviews are leading me to believe I might like. I’m on the fence about Bond. I’ve never been a big Bond fan. The only Bond movie I’ve ever liked is Casino Royale. I know that is crazy. I think young Sean Connery is gross. I think Bond is a sociopath. I just don’t find those movies compelling, there I said it. Casino Royale was good because he actually cared about a human and that made all the action compelling, plus that movie sparked my short-lived but intense crush on Daniel Craig, now thankfully mostly extinguished, so I look back on it with a certain frisson.

Well, what a shame! What a shame, Ridley Scott. Your triumphant return to the Alien franchise was, shall we say, not as good as the original Alien movie. Shall we say more than that? Shall we say it was kind of a disaster? Everyone else is saying it, so why not me?

- if all life on earth is here because one of those giant blue guys turned himself into DNA a billion years ago on our earth, then wouldn’t all animals on earth have the same DNA as humans, à la that part when what’s her face shows the drunk guy the little iPhone that proves the big blue guy corpse has the same DNA as humans?

- what kind of highly-trained space biologist sees a never-before-documented alien creature pop out of the primordial goo on an alien planet and then just immediately sticks his face down and reaches his hand out to, what, grab it? Is that what biologists do, they just sort of grab whatever pops up when they’re out on the job? This guy is like John Steinbeck or something, just hauling sea turtles up out of the ocean and chopping them up to see if they have livers. That’s good science!

- Why did Michael Fassbender infect the drunk guy with the alien crude oil? He had no motivation for doing so aside from that fact that the drunk guy was inexplicably cruel to him. It seemed like he just did it on a whim. Does this mean cyborgs have whims? Come on!

- Why was the drunk guy so inexplicably cruel to Michael Fassbender? Just so we could establish more muddy Creator/Creation tension?

- Why did Michael Fassbender make what’s her face stay pregnant in that one really malicious and terrifying scene? It was totally going to be a Rosemary’s Baby style pregnancy terror where he was like “oh I’m terribly sorry but you have to stay pregnant until the alien eats you–MWAH HA HA HA HA,” but then she just immediately gives herself a C-Section (note: best part of the film, stick with your wheelhouse, Ridley Scott and the Alien franchise) and then stumbles into the meeting with Fassbender and the old dude and everyone is like “ho hum.” Is Michael Fassbender just a motive-less psychopath?

- What were we supposed to think Charlize Theron’s motivations were, as a character? She was like one part corporate goon, one part crazy operatic madwoman, one part bitchy daughter, one part great hero. I mean, when she flame-throwered the drunk guy, that was actually an incredibly heroic, righteous act that would have saved the ship if they’d all paid better attention. But we were supposed to read it as her being a cold bitch. Ripley would have fucking torched that guy to the max, are you kidding me? He was turning into an alien! So was Theron supposed to be a villain or what? She was set up as a villain but then she did literally nothing for the rest of the film except heroically torch the drunk guy

- Why was the old dude played by a young person in old-face??? I just assumed that, because of the old-face, at some point he was going to be touched by an alien and would go back in time, Benjamin Button style, or at least that we’d get a flashback. But he was old all the way through. Why didn’t they just hire an old person? It was unbelievably distracting.

Some funnier questions we had:

- So they wake up the big blue guy who’s been in cryo sleep for 2,000 years, and he’s like “huh?” and then Fassbender says something to him in his language and then he immediately just kills everyone and starts revving his 2,000 year old space ship up to continue the mission to blow up the earth. Some hyper-intelligent god-like alien soldier he is! He doesn’t stop to be like “Hey is this mission still on, or what? Maybe I should radio back to base and see if I’m still supposed to blow up that entire planet from 2,000 years ago”?? He doesn’t stop to be like “why is this weird looking thing speaking to me in my language, that’s pretty interesting maybe?”

- So we are told that all this shit went down 2,000 years ago–that 2,000 years ago they were going to try to destroy earth by releasing WMD aliens upon us, à la God and the Flood, the famous part of Genesis where God admits he made a mistake. And Noah’s like “but what about me” and God’s like “oh yeah, you’re okay, you can live” and then later Noah’s son sees him naked and that’s why some people are slaves. ANYWAY, so 2,000 years ago, our Creators decided to kill us. WHY? There are two possible interpretations, given the very explicit “2,000 years ago” thing:

1. They somehow sent us Jesus to tell us how to do a good job in life, and we misinterpreted and crucified him instead, and they were like “ok that’s it with these people”

2. Jesus was just a human who was trying to change the course of culture and they DISAPPROVED OF HIM

Obviously I like option 2 a lot more.

I find the driving themes of the Alien franchise to be pretty compelling, although perhaps not always in the way they are meant to be compelling. I find it very interesting, the vagina/pregnancy terror of these films. Every time I re-watch an Alien movie I almost cry, wishing Freud were around to write about it. This terror of Creation, of wombs, of vaginas. It’s more explicit than ever, in Prometheus. When the alien gets its revenge on the giant blue guy and basically rapes him with its horrible tooth-vagina. Yeah, we get it! Pregnancy, sex, vaginas, parents = all sites of horror. Freud would be like “THATS WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS WHOLE TIME”

Killing your parents, killing your creator. Creator/Creation locked in hateful battle. The blue guys created humanity and now want to destroy us. They created the aliens who now want to destroy them. Humans gestate aliens in their bodies and then the aliens kill the humans in being born. Humans hate androids even though they created them. Fassbender wants to kill the drunk guy (a human) and also the old guy (his father). Theron wants her father to die. “It’s like Ridley Scott hates himself for creating the Alien franchise,” said my old man.

If the blue guys created us, and they created the titular aliens, then that means humans and aliens also must share DNA. We are the same. Brother against brother. The enemy within.

One thing I really do appreciate about Prometheus is that it’s another one of these movies that has such an incredibly hateful message about mankind. We live in the age of “Earth Fights Back” movies–natural disaster movies but also movies like Melancholia and Cabin in the Woods, which have ultimate messages of, like, “oh god, how we have fucked up” or “we all deserve to die” or even “thank god, we’re finally all going to die.” I love that Prometheus is all about these two dipshit scientists trying to find God to ask him a question and instead what they discover is that their God HATES THEIR GUTS and wants to MURDER THEM IMMEDIATELY because humanity is such an irredeemable piece of shit. I kind of think this is a great quality of this otherwise muddy and incomprehensible picture show.

Michael Fassbender for president, also Idris Elba! Elba/Fassbender 2012! Everyone else in that movie can eat a bag of tooth vaginas

This movie is beautiful. It is nearly flawless. It is pitch-perfect and all the other terms you use to describe good cinema. It’s a romantic comedy sort of but it’s also deeply sad, and it has this incredible ending I don’t want to spoil. But I will tell you that the entire audience spontaneously broke into applause when this one thing happened at the end, which I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced before. Also I was crying. Rom/com my butt! That’s just a good picture show.

It’s about Aubrey Plaza, who is playing her usual character. She’s grouchy and salty and hates everything. Her father, Jeff Garlin, tells her that she’s sad and doesn’t have any friends, and that her college roommate says she’s a virgin (“We’re facebook friends!”), and he’s worried about her. The movie quickly establishes that she’s a poorly-treated intern at some Seattle magazine run by Mary Lynn Rajskub, who’s demanding story ideas from her bored underlings. The amazing Jake Johnson proposes one–someone has posted an ad in the paper that is kooky and could make for a hilarious piece of bullshit journalism. The editor gives the ok, assigns him Aubrey Plaza and a nerdy Indian guy (ok I’ll admit I’m tired of the nerdy Indian guy trope) as his assistants, and we’re off!

There’s so much else going on in this story though. It’s about regret, and sorrow, and all the different reasons people have for wanting to go back in time. And the whole movie is suffused with this gentle tragedy, this awareness that what’s done is done, and everyone is just getting older and that’s that. Jake Johnson slowly reveals that his secret agenda in pitching this story is that the ad was posted in the town he grew up in, and he wants to reconnect with his high school girlfriend because he’s realized his life has gone off track. Aubrey Plaza’s reason is that she wants to stop her mother from being murdered.

It’s in the revelation of details that these plots and side plots become so affecting. Jake Johnson’s old girlfriend turns out to be not some obvious boring babe but an actual 30-something woman–gorgeous, but you know, full-figured, with wrinkles, and he has to overcome his years of plastered-on douchebaggery to continue pursuing her. For some reason watching this happen is super compelling. Seeing into the soul of a sad sad man and finding that what he really wants is just a lady who’s a good person, a partner, and he wants to have a nice home and he wants to be connected to his past. And then the movie doesn’t bullshit us on this point, though, either–the woman in question has her own thing going on, her own thoughts on the subject, and it’s not just about him becoming a man or whatever. Indeed that sideplot does not end well and it’s suddenly crushing when it doesn’t. Poor Jake Johnson, driving his go-cart and sobbing! More details: Plaza doesn’t just say “I want to stop my mom from being murdered.” She tells the story of the murder, and in the details it becomes devastating. The details that you’d remember, if your mom actually was murdered. The annihilating guilt and shame. Mark Duplass plays the time traveler and again, there are all these nuances and well-chosen details that turn him from a kooky weirdo who you’d never believe anyone could fall in love with into someone I’m pretty sure I had an intense romance dream about last night.

The performances were so good, every single one. Jake Johnson plays “Nick” on The New Girl with Zooey Deschanel, and we’ve been remarking this whole time about what a fucking star he seems like. I think everyone on that show is really good, but Jake Johnson stands out to the max. He takes it to the next level in this movie. And Mark Duplass! When he showed up I was thinking, how am I going to buy this dude as an emo romantic figure? I know him from The League. But he seriously brings it. There’s a scene with a campfire and a zither that I can barely even think about it’s so touching. By the end of the movie just looking at his face made my eyes get all wet and sad. What in the world!?

I feel like I’ve already said too much, but the film is really about its story (which my film scholar old man described as “impeccable”) and it’s hard to talk about it without going into the plot. It’s the first loosely-described rom/com I can remember seeing that doesn’t have a slack middle section and/or a contrived conflict and/or a hacky ending of some sort. Everything fits together so perfectly. It’s also very funny, I think I’m making it sound morbid. It’s both!

When the heat gets hot, do you have a partner who’s got your back? Bottom line.

I am pleased to see this has a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Thank you and good morning

What we get with this movie, The Bourne Indecency? The Bourne Referendum? The Bourne Quad Cities Sheepshearing Assemblée? is the bait-and-switch of the summer. It begins with Renner, puzzled, jockish, weirdly hirsute up in Alaska deep in the winter snow. I say weirdly hirsute in that his face beard is supposed to show us how long he has been out repeatedly diving into this icey river
and staring down wolves over a campfire in a survival assignment–it is shaggy and pubic-wild, moustache is snaggly and hanging into his mouth… but his neck and cheeks are perfectly clean shaven. With beards being such a hot trend, did these people in charge of the beard think we wouldn’t notice the difference between groomed and ungroomed. These are the kinds of things that set me off with a movie. Like in Drive when Joan from Mad Men has on lipstick and then she is shot and her lips are pale. C’mon, we are not that dumb!

Anyhow, Jeremy Renner and his ass beard make their way to a cabin outpost of a fellow in his same spy? superdefender? man machine? program and he we learn that unlike Jason Bourne, these dudes are made superhuman style not through heavy duty PTSD-inducing tortures but by blue pills (insert Viagra joke or allegory here). It’s unclear why Jeremy Renner needs more–is he cracked out or trying to double down or kill himself or is it like Roids and he just wants to have a huge nasty chest. It’s unclear. We find out he is really good at being super human. That is established, and perhaps that is all that is clear. Meanwhile, scenes from the end of the last movie are intercut so as to posit this as happening concurrent to Jason Bourne going rogue, Pam Landry exposing it all and David Strathairn yelling “SHUT IT DOWN” or “Cut it off!” every 85 seconds. The Bourne program getting out into the open means that all the other way dicey programs will be exposed so they have to kill all the tuff bros and operatives round the world. That, right there, is like, 38 slow minutes into the film. The best thing that happens in the first half of the film is Renner trying to feed some sort of tracking device to a wolf, which will make anyone who has ever had to feed a pill to their cat or dog laugh. It is also funny because it is a bad CGI wolf momentarily. AND THEN (SPOLIER ALERT!) A DRONE PLANE BLOWS THE WOLF TO KINGDOM COME!

I kind of forgot what happens after that but I think the idea is that Renner walks a long way to freedom, but maybe I am confusing that with the new Batman movie. Oh, yeah, he steals a plane! And flies it down a creek, about 10 feet off the water. Not exactly a thrillride, but it made me think a thrill might come.

Then there is a side plot that is never quite explained about the gov’t lab where the blue pills and tests are tracked and administered to these buff man machines. A guy who is in every movie and who was also super scary in the horrible 4th or 5th season of HEROES (OMG REMEMBER THAT SHOW!?) goes on an inexplicable shooting rampage, perhaps commanded by the government in order to clean up some loose ends. It’s a tangle not worth recounting. Somehow Jeremy Renner in his Alaskan pontoon plane gets to Virginia to the house of Dr. Rachel Weisz, they escape and burn some hokey actors who are chasing them.

We now learn, in the actiony drama of Jeremy Renners intuitive killings, that he wants free of this medicine. Though maybe he has a virus that makes him free. But either way he wants to get off the shit, not be the government’s junkie, which you understand because he is way to vulnerable and just doesn’t seem like he is up for the job in the first place. The only way to get free is him and the Doctor have to go to Bangkok or Malaysia or Panama City and re-up his pill supply from a mini-fridge in a basement, that he can overdose his way out of it. Blah Blah some flashback and back and side story and crunch crunch he breaks some Asian necks. Maybe him and Rachel Weisz are kind of having a moment amidst his killing-for-survival spree. After a long night of sweating, he wakes up and either does or does not have his super fighting strength. An Asian SUPERSECRET INDESTRUCTIBLE KILLING GUY IS UNLEASED VIA PUDDLE JUMPER AT A PRIVATE AIRPORT TO GO KILL RENNER… and so begins a long stupid chase that is mostly running through a slum–a rip from every previous Bourne movie. It’s not a Bourne movie unless someone is hopping from atop a tin roofed shack on to an improvised third-world trash-built dwelling.
This is where most of the trailer comes from, the last 20 minutes of the film or so. There is a He’s dead/oh no he’s not/Oh yes he is/now he is really dead motorcycle chase where you do not believe for a second that Renner will not escape because we have been given no reason to believe the Asian Killing Machine is as tough as they say. He got on the plane with a manly leather overnight bag looking all GQ’d out. How tough can he be, you know?

The ending is mad hokey. White people having a romantic brunch on a barge, cue theme song. ZZZZZZZZ. No wonder Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon bailed on this installment. It’s boring aaaaaaand hokey and barely made sense. Worst of all, because we paid a babysitter and full evening movie ticket prices and got twizzler and a Sprite that only came in illegal-in-NY bucket sizes, I paid $66 out of pocket to see this. This is my shame.
WAAAH.

CONTRABAND:

INANE

BOURNE IDENTITY RE-VIEWING:

GREAT